Hawley takes aim at 'corporate welfare' after GOP-backed tax

It’s hard not to notice the target here: not small-town developers rehabbing a block, but tech behemoths planting giant AI data centers and cashing in like they’re doing the country a favor. Josh Hawley is calling the opportunity zone break “corporate welfare,” and on this narrow point, he’s not wrong. If the “incentive” mostly rewards the richest players, it’s not much of an incentive.

Opportunity zones were sold as a way to pull investment into places that have been left behind. In practice, they’ve often turned into a tax-friendly lane for projects that were going to get financed anyway, just with better accounting. Now you’re telling voters a trillion-dollar company needed a special break to pour concrete for servers. Come on. A tax code that picks winners shouldn’t keep picking the same winners.

And yes, it’s awkward that this is a GOP-backed tax policy getting heat from a Republican. But that’s not a crisis. It’s a correction. Conservatives are allowed to look at a program, see it drifting, and tighten it up. If opportunity zones are being used as a subsidy pipeline for AI buildouts, Congress should either narrow the rules or tie the benefit to outcomes that actually matter to the community, not to the company’s press release.

The bigger tell is how fast “green energy,” “semiconductors,” and now “AI” become magic words that excuse any carve-out. Democrats do it openly with industrial policy. Republicans shouldn’t do it quietly through the tax code. If we’re going to hand out breaks, they should land where the promise was made: in struggling neighborhoods, not in boardrooms..